Strange perspectives at FAIR

Adjacent to the existing accelerator complex of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research at Darmstadt, Germany, the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) substantially expands research goals and technical possibilities. It will provide worldwide unique accelerator and experimental facilities allowing for a large variety of unprecedented fore-front research in hadron, nuclear and atomic physics as well as applied sciences which will be described briefly in this paper. The start version of FAIR, the so-called Modularized Start Version, will deliver first beams in 2017/2018. As an example the paper presents research efforts on strangeness at FAIR using heavy ion collisions, exotic nuclei from fragmentation and antiprotons to tackle various topics in this area. In particular hypernuclei and metastable exotic multi-hypernuclear objects will be investigated.